Snapshots
by x-the-rising-x
Summary: "It is a random universe to which we bring meaning." 11 drabbles written off prompts from my lovely tumblr followers. Peter/Olivia and one Lincoln/Altliv for good measure.


**Title: **"Snapshots" — 11 drabbles

**Pairing: **Peter/Olivia, and one Lincoln/Altliv for good measure.

**A/N: **Written off prompts from my lovely twitter followers. This is obnoxiously cross-posted everywhere.

**Rating: **T, but M-ish at moments

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><p><em>Peter<em>_**&**__Olivia:_

— _Book_ —

"_It is a random universe to which we bring meaning,"_she reads aloud from Peter's favorite book. "Do you think Sheldon Kopp knows what we know?"

He laughs lightly and leans over in bed to pull the glasses off the bridge of her nose and drop a kiss in her tousled hair. "I'm banking on no."

She closes the book. A beat, and then, "Does it ever make you feel insignificant — arbitrary — knowing there's an infinite number of universes out there?" she asks quietly.

"No," Peter says after a small silence, dragging his fingers lightly across her stomach. "It just makes me feel all the more happy I found you in this one."

— _Baby —_

She couldn't decide whether the baby belonged to both worlds or neither, and though she wanted to believe the former was true, the flicker of Peter in the newborn's eyes and the somehow present smell of an excruciatingly distant patriarch on his tiny body only reminded her that his existence was a dividing one. Smooth pink skin and flexible baby limbs and she loves him almost more than she can bear but weeks pass and no name comes. Her college history professor spoke of cycles — she wonders if her son is destined to be a nomad like his father.

— _Snow — _

Walter likes the individual flakes when they crystallize on his ratty jacket in early January and Peter keeps just one eye trained on his giddy and wandering father as they walk through quiet Cambridge at night. Her gloved hand slips into his and he turns to look at her.

Olivia's eyes are sharp green, set against the black and white night, her cheeks rosy, her face full of bright, happy color. She is laughing — really laughing — about something Walter is saying, but Peter isn't listening to Walter.

The words fall out before he can stop them — he whispers I love you into her hair and the words are almost quiet enough to get caught and carried away by the wind, but not quite. Snow gathers in her blond hair. She grins and presses a chaste but full kiss into the side of his mouth and whispers the words right back.

— _LSD — _

There would be something awfully poetic about the whole thing — it was a knee-jerk, gut decision made by a boy who's heart ached more and more with each day of her absence, and who knew, without a doubt she would do the same for him.

There would be something awfully poetic about the whole thing if he didn't feel like just another violator, another person impinging on her consciousness, and he wonders how her brain has enough crawl space to accommodate them all.

The IV drips; the drug latches on. They crawl through the maze of her guarded mind — he tries to yell out her name but the vowels and consonants tumble out in a strangled whisper. He'll find her — he has to.

— _Eyes — _

_His eyes tell tricks,_ she thinks._ Sneaky like his father._His eyes tell tricks, but his eyes are also her own and she flinches lightly when he grabs a hold of her index finger with his small chubby hand. He will learn to know and love a mother who is not his own, and yet somehow is.

In his wide green irises she sees reflections, memories of a crumbling world and a promise she made to a woman she could have been.

This child she will love. _"I will be the best mother I can possibly be to you,"_ she whispers into his skin. Across the room, Peter looks up — watches them as though he's heard those words before.

— _Car broke down — _

In another world, things are even more similar, only accelerated: she falls into his bed in the second week, not the second year. And it is not his bed, but the heated leather seat in the back of his car; it is a sweltering, sluggish afternoon in August and they are driving to the scene of yet another gruesome event that neither really wants to see.

The car sputters to the edge of the road and she is pissed off and too warm and they spit back and forth insults and blame but when he pitches forward suddenly into her lips she wonders if she has been misconstruing her frustration as anger rather than something much different.

He is more rough than just around the edges and it is more like an aggressive game, as though she needs to prove to him that she can keep up. Her right hand presses against the warm glass of the window as he yanks her under him — her left claws into the skin of his lower back. He bites down on her lower lip to either stifle or encourage a moan — she doesn't know which but he succeeds in the latter.

The car idles haphazardly in the shoulder of the road; truck drivers honk and whistle as they pass by.

— _Coffee — _

The little things like coffee, a book, six words scribbled on lined paper — they add up. The little things slip under her skin and grate against a mounting exhaustion that has kept her wanting to give in and let go because every time he rests a hand on her shoulder or stares at her a beat too long, her pulse quickens and she finds herself inundated with heated flashbacks to moments she never had.

She drinks her coffee black and he knows this but two years of a foundation and two years of building comfort and two years of ripples and undercurrents of tension have been washed away in a sandstorm of a lie he failed to see. She walks harshly through the rubble of his blindness.

— _Whiskey — _

She pads back into the room around 2 a.m., the sleeves of his button down extending over her wrists, the bottom hem barely covering the tops of her bare legs. She clutches the handle of whiskey loosely in her left hand, a shy smile tugging at her lips.

"I like you in my shirt," he murmurs, reaching to her from under the covers in the dim room. Her legs bump against the edge of the bed and he curls his fingers around the backs of her thighs. "Are you trying to take advantage of me?" he asks, nodding to the bottle as she places it on the bedside table.

"I clearly don't need to get you drunk to have my way with you," she says with smirks, crawling under the covers and letting their legs intertwine He swallows slightly when her skin makes contact with his own. "I was chilly — I thought it could warm us up."

"You know there are other ways to warm up." He nuzzles her clavicle lightly and hears her breath catch ever so slightly as he curves his body over hers.

She lets out something between a laugh and a moan and Peter feels his chest tighten ever so slightly at the familiar strangeness of the sound.

Like a dream, he only realizes after waking up how strange and off everything was in the first place. You feel real, he remembers saying, but dreams always feel real until their deceit is uncovered.

"You are real," he whispers into her neck too softly for her to hear him.

— _Feet — _

She drags her feet more these days; this is all metaphorical of course — she will never not walk in her rigid, professional, I'm-the-fucking-boss gait, and she will never let anyone see that she is anything but On. Her. Game. But she drinks more than she should and smiles less than she should and he hates that he's fractured her even more.

On a night in February she will play dress up in black satin and red lipstick and send a bullet through the neck of a man seeking vengeance, and Peter will wait in the van with bated breath.

He'll bring her coffee and she'll smile — he'll wonder what it takes to rebuild burnt bridges.

— _Birthday — _

Birthdays were never anything but hardened reminders of childhood empty promises — candles that were never lit and happy birthdays that were never sung and a swing set in sweltering Jacksonville where she finally decided at age eight that she would stop celebrating. She cannot conjure up the memory now — just knows that it exists — and instead harbors an entrenched and un-fathered desire to forget yearly that time is passing and things are no less lonely or quiet than they were 12 months ago.

But on the day she turns 32 she wakes with steady breath on her neck and a body at her back. Peter is snoring and the baby is crying and downstairs in the kitchen Walter has the blender on high speed.

Such grating, clashing noise has never been so welcomed.

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><p><em>Lincoln<em>_**&**__AltLivia: _

— _Smile — _

With absentee fathers and imploding worlds and remnants of paranoia still lingering on her skin, she cannot smile. Even when her son does for the first time.

Lincoln pulls faces for Henry and the baby squeals and tracks the gaze of a man who is no more but certainly no less than a fervent replacement for the father he will never meet.

She sees the other side one more time, through a window projecting something that feels very much like a false and constructed reflection. She sees the girl — herself but not — beam into Peter's lips on the corner of the street in a Boston neighborhood that was swallowed in amber in this world years earlier.

Olivia turns away from the window, from an opportunity for revelations and truth-telling. She's stolen her counterpart's smile once before — she knows this. She won't do it again.

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><p>Written off of prompts provided by my lovely Tumblr followers.<p>

Written off of prompts provided by my lovely Tumblr followers.


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